By Mauro Orru

Unilever, the owner of Ben & Jerry's ice cream, Sunsilk shampoo and Dove soap, said it had completed the sale of its Russian business to a local company, departing the country more than two years since Russia invaded Ukraine.

The Anglo-Dutch consumer-goods giant said Arnest Group, a Russian maker of perfume, cosmetics, and household products, had bought its entire business in the country as well as activities in neighboring Belarus, though it didn't disclose terms of the deal.

"The completion of the sale ends Unilever Russia's presence in the country," Unilever Chief Executive Hein Schumacher said in a statement. Schumacher said the group was carefully charting its exit from Russia over the past year in what had been a complex process that involved separating IT platforms and supply chains.

The company said its Russian business, which employed roughly 3,000 people, represented around 1% of sales and net profit in the first six months of 2024, with net assets of about 600 million euros ($656.4 million), including four factories.

Unilever faced criticism for staying in Russia after its full-blown invasion of Ukraine, while many other Western businesses scrambled to exit the country. The group said it had stopped all capital flows, imports and exports of products into and out of Russia as well as media and advertising spend since March 2022. However, it said leaving Russia wouldn't be straightforward given its significant physical presence in the country.

The Kremlin has made it difficult for Western business to disentangle after the Kremlin decreed that the state can take temporary control of assets of companies or individuals from what officials there calls "unfriendly" states.

Last year, Moscow appointed Chechnya's agriculture minister as the head of Danone's business in the country and tapped a Russian businessman to run Carlsberg's operations there. The Kremlin also intervened to seize Western assets in the energy sector, including stakes from Germany's Wintershall Dea and Austria's OMV in a joint venture that operates an oil, gas and condensate field in Western Siberia.

Write to Mauro Orru at mauro.orru@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

October 10, 2024 06:03 ET (10:03 GMT)

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